Gary Lachman
Inner Traditions ($30)

by Luke Gilfedder              

Few musicians in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame go from earning gold records to writing biographies of Carl Jung, Rudolf Steiner, and Madame Blavatsky. Yet Gary “Valentine” Lachman—the former Blondie bassist who penned the hit single “(I’m Always Touched by Your) Presence, Dear”—has long resisted categorization. In his latest book, he turns an analytical lens on his own life story, offering wide-ranging assessments of the twentieth-century philosophers and literary thinkers who shaped his evolution from comic-book-obsessed misfit to CBGB-era rock star to serious student of the esoteric tradition.

Spanning from the early 1970s through the 1990s, Touched by the Presence is as much about the books Lachman encounters on his journey as it is about the cultural icons he meets along the way. Indeed, among his teenage anecdotes of living with Debbie Harry and Chris Stein in pre-gentrification New York, the most enduring image is of Lachman freezing in Blondie’s Bowery loft on Christmas Eve, burning Jimi Hendrix posters to keep warm while reading Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy.

Blondie’s meteoric rise from poverty to New Wave stardom provides a heady backdrop to Lachman’s inner odyssey: the story of how a self-styled “library cormorant” from working-class Bayonne, New Jersey—primed by Silver Age comics and Lovecraft’s cosmic horror—discovers his true calling after stumbling upon a tattered copy of Colin Wilson’s philosophical treatise The Occult, borrowed from Tommy Ramone. The memoir’s emotional crux is Lachman’s meeting with Wilson in Cornwall, which he recalls as the first time he was “ever starstruck”—no small claim from a man who has argued with David Bowie and gotten drunk with Iggy Pop.

The latter half of the memoir follows Lachman’s immersion in Gurdjieff’s “Fourth Way” movement, Crowley’s O.T.O., and his work at Los Angeles’s iconic metaphysical bookshop, Bodhi Tree. A well-written life is as rare as a well-spent one, and it is to Lachman’s credit that these maturer years read no less compellingly than his early punk adventures. His portrayal of embracing dual identities like the comic-book heroes of his youth—philosophy student by day, New Age bookseller by night—is particularly effective in capturing the book’s central tension between intellectual skepticism and spiritual hunger.

The memoir concludes on the eve of Lachman’s flight to London to become a full-time writer, twenty years on from that freezing Christmas in the Bowery—a satisfying first-act close that leaves both author and reader poised on the brink of what comes next. As much an intellectual bildungsroman as a memoir, Touched by the Presence is a characteristically idiosyncratic contribution to the otherwise generic annals of rock autobiography—erudite, irreverent, and refreshingly learned.